Trance

Knock! Knock! Knock! A cute crime movie, cut precisely to suit today’s fashion. It’s just that hypnosis isn’t so central as PR tried to imply and the painting isn’t absolutely what this is about. Sanity, lies, anger, love and hate. Boyle mixed this cocktail following his own traditional recipe and his signature is apparent in almost every shot (the beaker thrown at the camera), maybe the trailers gave away too much. Cassel excellent, Rosario Dawson super smooth and McAvoy masterfully swaps roles and is the inconspicuous puppet master of the entire Trance. Delightful and not completely stupid. Rick Smith supervised the creation of the first-rate music. (14/07/2013)

Okay, it's true that this movie is very convoluted and that I wanted to see it mainly because Rosario Dawson is in it and she really shows a lot. A gorgeous woman. "Trans" is cluttered and something could be cut out, but the rules are clearly set and the truth can be anywhere. It's up to you whether you accept the message of the film or not. And I accept it, especially when the actors are this great. Danny Boyle is once again very brave. (23/10/2013)

Danny Boyle scores points with his truly unmistakable style even in the field of a hard-to-classify psychological heist thriller, which is wonderfully subtle and actually quite unpredictable. An exemplary symbiosis of sound and image (one of the best "hypnotic" soundtracks used in the film), novel creative techniques (even a simple slap can be filmed and presented in an evocative and original way), and one of the top performances by Rosario Dawson, who must have been cast in this role by some casting genius. I like Boyle much better in this slightly unconventional and understated position (I’m looking at you, Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire), as these types of more modest and intimate works give him much more scope to use his undeniable talent and original techniques. (11/02/2019)

Danny Boyle is simply awesome. Trance is not his best movie, but it doesn’t change the fact that he is able to film literally anything. He had fun with the camera in a drug lair, in an Indian slum, near the Sun, with millions in his suitcase or he sweated for 127 hours in the mountains and this time for a change hypnosis plays a major role, and we see an entanglement of the whole story with the aim of preparing a shocking finale. And he succeeded. The movie may be a little too dynamic and a bit complicated, but that’s simply Boyle and that’s why I like him so much. The whole movie really has guts and every five minutes there is something happening that turns the story upside down. If you can accept that, you will be satisfied. (16/10/2013)

A film that has an embellished but far-fetched plot. It was interesting, the actors were good, we never got sick of them even though there were only a few of them that we kept switching between; still, it somehow just couldn't hold my attention the whole time. The jumping from hypnosis to the real world and back is supposed to be interesting, the viewer is supposed to wonder what’s real and what’s not, yet I didn't see it that way. Instead it gave me a rather tired impression, which I only woke up from towards the end when the shooting started. Even though I wrote that the final payoff was excessive, it still fails to impress with a proper wow effect if the viewer has seen a few similar films. You can see through the smoke effects. But if Boyle wanted the viewer to feel sympathy for a man who gets a bundle at the end, he succeeded. A mediocre film. (01/03/2017)